Modern British literature

Modern British literature is the 20^th--21^st centuries literature of Great Britain, including works by several authors of unique "double" affiliation, like James Joyce (both an Irish and a British author), Thomas Stern Elliot and Henry James, who equally belong to American and British literatures.

It is unclear when the 20^th century started for British literature. British authors quote different dates of minor and major events that, to their mind, started modern British literature. A major modern poet, William Butler Yeats wrote that it was in 1900 that they all [poets] finally left their crutches behind. A similar date, 1901, is quoted because it was the end of the reign of Queen Victoria and her epoch, Victorian England. Virginia Wolf claimed that British XX century started with the exhibition of Impressionists in London, which opened in 1910. A Scottish poet, Edwin Muir dated it as August 1914 and John Fowles as late as September 1937, using the dates of the beginning of the World Wars that shook Britain.

Most researchers agree, though, that modern British literature emerged in the 1890s which marked the transition from the classic aesthetic that viewed literature to be a reflection of reality towards new artistic philosophy that proclaimed the autonomy of art. It was the time when many modern writers started their career, including Joseph Conrad, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy. It was the time when new theatre emerged with its drama of ideas represented by George Bernard Shaw.

Modern British literature developed against the background of the tragic collapse of the British Empire, which continued during the whole century. Before the 1920s, the British Empire controlled about one fourth of the world population and territory, the Second World War ended the period of decolonization with its painful crush of the imperial idea which for many British citizens substituted the national outlook.

The main legacy of the British Empire was the English language with its international status, which, on the one hand, has created the largest reading audience for British literature in the world and, on the other, kept back the development of national literatures of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, within Britain.

The loss of the imperial idea meant a severe psychological crisis for the nation and the loss of one of the traditional topics for British literature. For literature, the colonial expanse meant the usual motives of adventures in a new reality (Rudyard Kipling), a possibility to meet the unknown, to describe the cultural contact and to see the British way of life through a new culture (Somerset Maugham and Edward Forster). On the other hand, the loss of the empire started the period of meditations upon its collapse, for example, in the plays by John Osborne and multi-volume series by Paul Scott and Percy Howard Newby. The "Imperial Trilogy" (1970-1978) by James Gordon Farrell shows a row of historical defeats of the Empire in Ireland, India and Singapore from the modern perspective and the situation of a siege described in each novel serves a metaphor for the whole trilogy. For the first time writers like Paul Scott and Vidiadhar Naipol started to describe the cruel reality of the post-colonial world.

The imperial and post-imperial experience made the East-West dilemma especially urgent for modern British literature, but a new generation of writers born in the former colonies would rather describe active contact between eastern and western cultures than their separate modes of living. Such writers as Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi with the Pakistni background, Timothy Mo from Hongkong, and Indian-born Salman Rushdie enriched modern British literature with their diverse cultural experiences. The peculiarity of British immigrant literature is its wide audience: it is created outside closed ethnic groupings and addressed to mass reader, discussed by national critics, and awarded national prizes. Immigrant writers discuss not only exotic topics, but are influenced by British classical tradition and work within the framework of the European system of genres. They do not position themselves as post-colonial writers, who would concentrate of the problem of "their own" and "the alien". For instance, the world-known Salman Rushdi has published a collection of short stories titled "East, West" (1994) and he claims that for him the most important thing in the title is the coma and that he himself lives within this coma.

British literature is one of the most traditional literatures among western literatures, a reputation gained primarily during the 19th century, the "Victorian Age," which was an embodiment of stability and tradition in literature understood as the tradition of the classical realistic novel of the 19^th century. Yet, for modern English writers the Victorian tradition is the background for the emerging modernism of late 19^th-early 20^th centuries, which positioned itself as an anti-Victorian movement. Modernism was a pan-European reaction to the realism of the 19^th century, positivism, and representational art. European modernism had many forms, including symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, futurism, constructivism, imagism, expressionism, dada, etc. Technically, modernism in literature meant most profound changes of the very essence of a work of fiction, regarding its structure, the concept of a character image, plot construction, and language. Mythological paradigms glued together the other fragmentary narration; impersonality liberated literary images from the "hard shell" of their character; the destruction of the stable ego of a character (D.H. Laurence), overcoming the "static nature" of life meant that the emphasis was shifted onto the internal action, resulting in the "connection between the feelings, not the events" (V. Woolf). Stream of consciousness, the use of myth as a structural principle, and the primacy given to the poetic image, all challenged traditional ways of representation and caused numerous readers' protests, as literature became more difficult to read.

Modernism of the 1910s-1920s gave way to the next generation of modern writers who would call themselves "new". These Oxford-affiliated writers and poets shifted the emphases from the personality onto social events and considered that new poetry must be an instrument to change the world. Disillusionment was brought by the Civil War in Spain, which showed that literary aspirations cannot be directly rendered into life.

Despite the opinion that British modernism remained the major artistic phenomenon, preserving its influence till 1980s and the era of post-modernism, post-war literature can be viewed as a reaction against the experiment of modernism. The close of modernism as a literary trend was conditioned historically (by the Second World War), personally (by the death of the leaders of the movement) and aesthetically, when its discoveries were assimilated by mainstream literature, which, maybe, is the purpose of all leading literary trends. Such reaction did not mean that literature would return to the 19^th century realism -- the new generation of writers called themselves "new realists" and wrote not about man as such, like the experimental modernists, but, rather, about man within the society. The new realists did not deny the experiment of modernism, they just did not want to be limited by its framework. The new wave comprised the first post-war generation of writers, who could be classified into "the Angry Young Men" (playwrights and writers of prose), "Worker novelists", and "the Movement" (prose and poetry). These writers and poets used both modern and traditional elements in their work.

The 1960s with their rebirth of the classical tradition, started the era of English post-modernism with its foundations in the concepts of the game and pleasure. The new trend is rooted in linguistic post-structuralism which proclaimed that the author of a literary work has no control over its meaning as perceived by a reader (see R. Barthe "The Death of the Author"), that there is no objective or finite scientific fact, so it is impossible to mimic the reality in a work of art, and that literature is intertextual and exists only on the crossroads of many interrelated discourses, texts, and styles. This brought about the construction of complex, often unreadable texts, full of allusions, told from multiple points of view, open to any interpretation, and maximally subjective. Many critics perceive the emergence of post-modernism as a reaction against the previous realistic period and predict a major return to realism and tradition in the 21^st century.

English literature has sometimes been labeled as insular. Nonetheless, all the trends in English literature, starting from Old English alliterative poetry to the rise of modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals and movements for inspiration. English literature is therefore not so much insular as detached from the continental European tradition. It is strong in all the conventional European genres. Modern English literature enriched its spectrum by introducing or developing many genres, including the theatre of the absurd, autobiographic novel, anti-utopia based in allegory and parable, pastiche, historical novel with history perceived personally, war poetry, detective and mystery story, political drama, thriller, spy novel, a range of genres of children's literature, including fantasy and school story, science fiction, etc. The wide variety of genres testifies to the great variety of topics discussed by English authors and the possible worlds they create.

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